makes sense to me.
If you’re going to drive the homicide rate down by 82 percent, you have to go to the hot spots where homicide and robbery and burglary keep happening. And that was the focus of the New York City police. And not only were they interested in the highest crime areas, but what they were interested in, the people they wanted to take off the streets, were not the people who were committing less serious crimes, they wanted to take the robbers and the burglars and the shooters off the streets. The way in which they did that is that they took suspicious persons and they instrumentally arrested them for small crimes.
“Suspicious persons” is a loaded term …
Marijuana was not a priority of the New York City police, but they had a huge number of public marijuana arrests. Why was that? That was because they were only arresting minority males who looked to them like robbers and burglars and they used as a pretext the less serious crime arrest to find out whether the particular person they were arresting had a warrant our for a felony and was a bad actor. In the immortal words of Jack Maple, who wrote that book in the late ’90s, they were looking for sharks not for dolphins.
Now there are some real problems of selection and minority with that strategy, but having said that, it doesn’t do us any good to misconstrue what the strategy was and to announce that somehow it was the maintenance of order that created the high crime impact. The reason that order maintenance can’t do that is because serious crime is deeply more concentrated in the worse parts of the city than order-maintenance issues. So you have to decide where you are going to invest your resources. And what New York City’s police department did from Day One was to invest their resources where serious crime was.
So when does reality trump political correctness?